S PECIAL-team players cost an NFL team the least amount of money against the salary cap, risk the limbs that are the most expendable, hold positions that are the most replaceable. After Games 1 and 2, in which the Jets couldn’t cover their own butts, we can only assume that this week, a few of them may have been threatened to within an inch or two of their football lives.
It was unlikely Kevin Williams was fazed, however, when he took the second kickoff of what
showed preliminary signs of being a long afternoon for the Jets. Williams never reached the end of his life when stricken last October with a bacterial infection that defied miracle drugs. But he certainly could see it from the bed where he lay far more clearly than yesterday he could make out the goal line.
“God has been real good to me,” said Williams. “He has stayed by me every day of my life and brought me back a long ways.”
Indeed, the 97 yards he ran for a touchdown seems far enough, both in the physical and metaphysical senses. Williams cut left and sliced through three Bills with an Anthony Becht-created hole that the kick returner’s savior himself might have stopped to admire at the Red Sea.
We will spare you any religious references Buffalo coach Wade Phillips may have been screaming at his players as Williams ran by the Bills’ sideline, stiff-arming kicker Steve Christie, then outrunning Donovan Greer. But the Jets, who had no answers for Jay Riemersma on Buffalo’s impressive first series, were born again.
“We were challenged this week,” said Chris Hayes, the soul of the special teams. “We knew we had to step up.
“Kevin Williams lit it with his great run and everybody threw gasoline on it.”
The Bills, playing all day like a kid sticking its hand in the fire, got burned, 27-14, in a contest decided largely by the kicking game. Al Groh, special teams coach Mike Sweatman and Hayes began by putting a few feet, symbolically, into some Jets’ behinds during the week, Williams ran the 97 yards, John Hall nailed a 51-yard field goal and Shane Burton blocked the fifth one of his career after the Bills had started the second half by driving to the Jets’ 24.
Victory was elementary, the Jets harassing and hitting Chris Watson, the Bills’ punt returner, into two late fumbles that enabled the Buffalo offense to be on the field for only seven fourth-quarter plays until the final two minutes. Hayes forced one drop, covered the other to key excellent coverage that extended to the kickoff teams, where the Bills were held to an average of 18.8 yards per return, a healthy nine under the unsatisfactory average of the first two games.
The Jets have some new guys who can run and yesterday they did, as if they grasp the reality of their new, thankless, lives after being big men on campuses.
“It’s hard for young guys,” said Hayes. “It was hard for me as well. In college, you don’t want to be out there because it’s not very glamorous and dangerous, too.
“You have to keep your head on a swivel. That’s the first thing a veteran tells you in this league.”
The coaches take it from there, detaching the kids’ skulls with a few well-chosen words, with accompaniment by the choir directed by Hayes.
“I challenged a guy like John Abraham,” said Hayes. “The rookies we have this year have a lot of talent and have to know how much they can contribute. They have to see guys like me know their roles and see how much they can contribute, too.
“With Abraham and Laveranues Coles, with his speed, and Bernie Parmalee’s and Dwayne Gordon’s leadership we can’t be stopped.”
The Jets, with the best win of their 3-0 start, cleared the air for Tom Tupa punts, which yesterday averaged 45.7 yards per and were returned for an average of only nine. In other words, the special teams had a special day, but then again every one is special for Williams.
“I wouldn’t wish what happened to me on anybody,” he said. “But if [people] could [hear] my story, maybe do something a little different with their lives, remember the people who love them, then if I could go though something like that to help them, I don’t mind.”
A guy who outran death certainly wasn’t looking over his shoulder for any Bills 11 months later. But go through what Kevin Williams did, and your peripheral vision figures to improve. Having been stripped on a return before he became deathly ill last season, Williams said his main concern was holding onto the ball.
Somehow, the expression “for dear life” hardly seems appropriate anymore. Asked if he ever expected to play football again, Williams said: “Football wasn’t really a concern. I almost lost Kevin, almost lost me.”
Indeed, the Bills’ temporary misplacement of him, critical as it was to a huge Jets’ win, still wasn’t the point.
